Photoshop and fake boyfriends – how to hoax your way to thousands of Instagram followers

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A couple of months ago I visited the Goldfish Market in Hong Kong, where hawkers ply a time-honoured trade in live fish. I watched as thousands of the critters swam around in their water-filled plastic bags, which hung from hooks outside pet shops. It reminded me of being at the fair as a kid.

It’s actually a bit of a sad story because the fish that aren’t sold within a couple of days are tipped down the drain and into Hong Kong’s sewers. It’s hardly worth contemplating what they end up swimming with down there.

Feeling sorry for them – but also, perhaps, sensing the opportunity for social media likes deep in my cerebral cortex – I decided to take a photograph of the bagged-up fish and post it on Instagram. The picture was accompanied by a short caption telling their story.

To be honest, it didn’t go down well. Of the three Instagram posts I mustered during my week-long trip to Hong Kong, it was by far the least liked of all – only 25 souls bothered double tapping (I got almost 20 more for a picture of a taxi!). It also prompted one follower, a friend of mine, to comment that the post wasn’t “super cheery, mate”, like I’d broken some unwritten rule of Instagram.

Which, of course, I had. Because Instagram doesn’t want sob stories about fish (or do I just need a different calibre of followers?). It wants selfies at sunset with clarendon filters and the saturation turned up to 11. My misguided goldfish post was well wide of the mark, but then most of them are (I once posted a picture of a pigeon that had keeled over next to an empty 2l bottle of Crofter’s cider in Pimlico – 15 likes).

Bagged-up goldfish do not get many Instagram likesCredit:
GAVIN HAINES

However, in a sign that real life is becoming even less fashionable on the social network, one tour company in Rome has started pimping out photographers, who, for the princely sum of €350, will be your “Instagram boyfriend”.

For the uninitiated, “Instagram boyfriends” are the blokes behind the lenses of their partners’ social media snaps. A sizeable corner of the internet is dedicated to these long-suffering fellows, who themselves have been papped perching on rocks, lying on their backs in the dirt and balancing on the edges of swimming pools, just to get a “grammable” snap of their beloveds.

Until recently, this social phenomena had been exclusive to couples. Not anymore. Singletons can now get in on the action thanks to Roma Experience, which is hiring professional photographers to take on the role of an “Instagram boyfriend”. The service launched last week and is available as an add-on to existing tours of the Italian capital.

The marketing department at Roma Experience, which claims the service is not a PR stunt (hmmm), is keen to stress that “the romance won't extend beyond the camera”. No happy endings here, then. It also says there’s no guarantee its “Instagram boyfriends” will be men, because they also employ female photographers. Right.

The company does, however, guarantee that at the end of their trip customers will have Insta-worthy snaps of themselves romping around Rome, taken by someone who may or may not be a man, but is definitely up for pretending to be their boyfriend. What a time to be alive.

If all that sounds like too much effort just to boost your followers, you could always take a leaf out of Carolyn Stritch’s book. Stritch is an Insta star who, judging by her feed, spends most of her time drinking coffee, reading books and travelling with her pooch. An extremely enviable life.

Anyway, last year Stritch notched up 20,000 likes for a picture of her walking through a deserted Disneyland Park in California, wearing a polkadot dress. Not bad considering she was actually in Sunderland. Stritch had merely found a photo of the theme park online and Photoshopped herself onto it. Most followers were fooled.

Stritch came clean in a later blog post, claiming the stunt was designed to “challenge the way I portray myself online and the effects of this portrayal”. It hasn’t seemed to have much impact on the tone of her feed, though. Recent posts portray the same heavily-filtered life of leisure; glum commuters scrolling through them on overcrowded trains could be forgiven for feeling a tad inadequate.

Nevertheless, Stritch’s fake post and Rome’s pretend boyfriends serve as pertinent reminders that on Instagram – a network that has been blamed for deteriorating mental health amongst users – things are not always as they seem. Scrollers beware of fool’s gold(fish).